For commerical websites, what is required of you to use the icon sets based upon their license?

It seems like with GPL/LGPL, there really isn't anything required (especially since you probably wouldn't merge the pictures into any of your assemblies), but what's required for the creative commons license? You need to attribute the work back to the author, but I wasn't entirely sure as to what was required in that regards

4 Answers
4

It depends on which Creative Commons license you use. For attribution, I believe that an easy to find page on your website attributing the author and linking to their site is all that is required.

Make sure that you read the license that comes with it though. Some Creative Commons licenses do not allow commercial use (your website makes money, maybe even adsense?), some do not allow derivations (recombining work to create your header?), etc.

The creative commons license is sometimes a bit difficult to interpret when it comes to derivative works.

If I put your icons unchanged in my web page or in an application, is that then a derivative work, or is it enough that I didn't alter your icon? In most cases, the author of the icon set probably doesn't mean to preclude that kind of use, but the license itself is not so clear on it.

For the GPL/LGPL case, you need to provide attribution and appropriate copyright notice and licensing information. You may also need to make additional flies available - if the icon set came with SVGs, XCFs, or other specialized formats from which the actual PNGs or GIFs are generated, I would think those constitute the "source" of the icons and therefore need to be distributed.